Dalhousie University Libraries Hosted Journals

Greenstein, Michael

Good, Graham

Hayes, Kevin J

Gibson-Billings, Victoria

Book Reviews

Blair, David

Ode to New Poems; At the Cold Cuts Table; Sound Solution; The Armies of Being Here; Black Mountain Music

Morash, K.E.

K. E. MORASH
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER’S WIFE
	 After Mark Waldron
On occasion, when the mood takes her,
as it sometimes does, she will put down
her broom, peel off her rubber gloves,
and ascend to the sweeping beam
for no reason at all, but to feel the tight
sinews at the back of her calves,
her ankles unsteady and breath shallow
as she surveys the metal helix curling
up to the all-seeing eye. Her husband
naps. When she reaches the top vibrations
take over her body and she hums in unison,
a perfect B flat. Her clitoris flares.
Although dizzy, arches pressed to the floor
she leans out to see the waves
as foam on her tea, cliffs as skin cracks
cities as pileups of mitochondria.
She waves her red flag and no one comes
but they all blink in the light. Mouths
70 The Dalhousie Review
gaping open to receive the jelly of salvation
as the beam cuts them from the darkness
momentarily, but they do not want
her spoon. A ship sails
in the wrong direction, away from
the beckoning curve of her biceps.
She climbs the rotating glass, blinded, spread￾eagled, shackled to the light.
Her body casts out a silhouette beacon:
the rocks are not where you think they are.

The Lighthouse Keeper

Rogal, Stan

STAN ROGAL
TABULA RASA
dig the universe as playful, cool, & infinitely blank
a tightrope-tremble across netless space
all of Leonardo’s science touched with magic
yet, how to be a match for the infinite?
you grow old, lose your hair, lose your teeth
small dogs perform their nasty habit on a pant leg
where prayer is less useful than whisky or a smoke
the clothes fit well, but what becomes the body?
clapped in the box beside the iced oysters
one looks around & sees much puff & twaddle
up to the neck in apostrophes & petty exclamations
all these words? all this language? wasted
why is it we never tire of the clown & puppet shows?
the vain attempt to make a virtue out of anachronism?
droning a drowsy syncopated tune . . . tra-la, tra-la . . .
haven’t you heard, haven’t you heard, the bells?
the snarling agnostic stands little chance amid such glory, glory
we become a pretty Proust machine
grinding out sweet madeleines for the mass

Tabula Rasa

White, Jerry

JERRY WHITE
THE MASTER GARDENER AND THE TEN
GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME
OF THE GROUP OF AMERICAN FILMMAKERS known as the “Film
School Generation” (Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma,
etc.), Paul Schrader is perhaps the hardest to get a clear handle on. His
best-known contribution to that cinematic moment of the 1970s was the
screenplay to Taxi Driver (1976)—a film that really did announce a renais￾sance but that is usually associated with its director, Martin Scorsese, for
whom Schrader would write several more screenplays. The material that he
went on to make as a director was sometimes hysterical (the 1979 George
C. Scott-starring Hardcore), sometimes slow and intensely brooding (the
1992 Willem Dafoe-starring Light Sleeper, which I confess a great fondness
for), and sometimes utterly unclassifiable and truly singular (the 1985 Ken
Ogata-starring Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which has to be one of
the weirdest commercial films of the 1980s). Since the 1990s he has directed
a film almost every two years, but nothing has really seemed to land in the
same way as his earlier material. He was a creature of the 1970s and 1980s,
when the Coppola-led dream of an American cinema that combined the in￾novation of European art cinema with the resources of Hollywood was at
its peak (it petered out after the height of that idealism, Apocalypse Now).
Only Schrader’s old capo Scorsese has really seemed able to sustain a full
career at that level of craftsmanship.
After seeing Schrader’s latest film, The Master Gardener (2022), I
found it impossible not to mentally summon that earlier period, even though
the narrative seems quite contemporary (spoilers ahead): a quiet gardener
named Narvel Roth (played by Joel Edgerton), who turns out to be a now￾repentant white supremist, having gone into witness protection after turn￾ing on the fellow members of his neo-Nazi militia, becomes entangled with
a young mixed-race woman named Maya (played by Quintessa Swindell),
120 The Dalhousie Review
who is trying to break away from a life in a drug-infested part of what looks
like New Orleans. The owner of the garden where Narvel works, who is also
Maya’s great aunt (played by Sigourney Weaver), comes to see that the gen￾tility-inflected entitlements of the old landed gentry are giving way, whether
she likes it or not. But the film itself isn’t contemporary at all. Really, it’s a
remake of Taxi Driver. Readers will recall that the titular antihero of that
film, Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro), was, like Narvel, a tattooed
journal keeper with (1) a sense that society is going to hell, (2) a penchant
for extreme violence, and (3) an inborn instinct to use that penchant to pro￾tect vulnerable young women threatened by societal collapse. In Taxi Driv￾er, that collapse was embodied by the Manhattan pimp Sport (played by
Harvey Keitel), and its victim was embodied by the 12-year-old sex worker
Iris (played by Jodie Foster). In The Master Gardener, it is embodied by the
drug dealers R. G. and Sissy (played by Jared Bankens and Matt Mercurio),
and its victim by the early-20s lost girl Maya. In both films it is a climactic
explosion of intense violence on the part of the antihero—Travis Bickle in
1976, Narvel Roth in 2022—that brings the film to what seems like a logical
conclusion but is in fact the prelude to a difficult-to-read contradiction. Are
these critiques of violence and denunciations of the way that the distinctly
American version of the extreme right wing can only end in a bloodbath?
If so, then they are awfully strange critiques and denunciations, given the
viscerally satisfying way they seem to bring both narratives to a close.
The Master Gardener compounds this fundamental problem in Taxi
Driver by giving us a happy ending (again, spoiler alert). Once all the guns
have been fired and legs have been broken, Narvel returns to the estate
where he worked and matter-of-factly tells Maya’s great aunt, who had been
his occasional sex partner, that he and Maya are moving back into the gar￾dener’s cabin to live as husband and wife. She says this is “obscene,” and he
shakes his head gently and responds, just as matter-of-factly, that it’s not
obscene. What she finds obscene is not entirely clear, but there are clear
racial echoes there, and Narvel’s gently firm response is a reminder that her
old aristocracy is passing and that a new world, after a painful birth, is com￾ing into being. It’s a noble sentiment, to be sure, but an odd one given the
squalor and violence that the previous reel has presented so vividly. How in
God’s name are we supposed to read this?
I ask the question that way for a reason. Schrader is a deeply religious
filmmaker, as evidenced by the screenplay he produced for Scorsese’s The
The Master Gardener and the Ten Greatest Films of All Time 121
Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and his recent Ethan Hawke vehicle First
Reformed (2017). In his earlier life as a film critic (on which more in the
second section), Schrader also published the book Transcendental Style in
Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972), which was an argument for the basically
religious quality of the stylistic approach taken by these three filmmakers.
Schrader’s Wikipedia entry suggests that he has drifted in and out of orga￾nized religion over the years but that today he identifies as a Christian and
has attended a Presbyterian church since 2018, seemingly a more or less
straightforward return to the Calvinism of his youth. An understanding of
his films thus requires a consideration of substantive religious matters, as
he is definitely not someone who is “spiritual rather than religious.” This is
why the ending of Taxi Driver plays like such an anticlimax, as it is clear
when Travis Bickle is celebrated in the media as a kind of avenging angel
that these are nothing more than the pomps of the devil (to deploy Catholic
vocabulary that would be anathema to the Calvinist Schrader of Taxi Driver
but very familiar to the Schrader of The Last Temptation of Christ a decade
later). In The Master Gardener, though, the wages of sin (i.e., returning to
the violence of his militia days by breaking legs and taking names) are liter￾ally a return to the garden and the promise of redemption, as we see, in the
words of the KJV’s Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Schrader’s violence-fuelled precursor to gentle images of redemption is an
odd vision inasmuch as it is clearly drawing upon narratives that are utterly
central to Christianity at the same time that it is radically rewriting the mor￾al teachings of that tradition, which is actually contrary to what was going
on in the conclusion of Taxi Driver. Schrader’s revisiting of that 1970s nar￾rative may be some sort of attempt to intervene in the discourse of contem￾porary religiously inflected cultural critique. Anyone who follows serious
Christian, and especially American Catholic, intellectual cultural critique
knows that much of it proceeds from deeply pessimistic assumptions, as the
reigning vision of modernity is a basically tragic one. The Master Gardener,
though, remains invested in redemption as the defining ethos of a Christian
worldview.
Taxi Driver and The Master Gardener are thus asking similar ques￾tions, yet they differ in fundamental ways. Taxi Driver asks: when violence
becomes inevitable, does this mean that grace is banished because we live
in a fallen world and such perfection is always beyond our reach? The an-
122 The Dalhousie Review
swer is yes, as Travis Bickle arrives at a life of pseudo-righteous and morally
empty celebrity that seems typically modern. The Master Gardner asks in
response: is it perhaps that the sin such violence embodies must be ignored
for exactly the same reason—namely, because we live in a fallen world, and
the true reconciliation of a repentant sinner who accepts all of the conse￾quences of his sin is just going to have to wait for the afterlife? I cannot
disguise my sense that Taxi Driver is the more demanding and morally seri￾ous vision of this dilemma, even if I also acknowledge the degree to which
many of that earlier film’s actual viewers take a kind of visceral pleasure
from the intensity of the film’s violence (which is also a problem, albeit a
much less religiously inflected one, in Quentin Tarantino’s films). And yet, I
can see that The Master Gardener is an attempt to insist upon the centrality
of redemption in the religious understanding of the world. Perhaps accept￾ing that is ultimately the greater challenge for a gloomy, tragedy-informed
Catholic intellectual like myself. The latter, more optimistic vision is cer￾tainly the one that is more consistent with the spirit of the age.
In addition to his book Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader remains
important in film criticism circles for a series of interventions he has made
over the years, mostly in the pages of the now-defunct and greatly missed
magazine Film Comment (which still persists as a biweekly email that rarely
rises above mediocrity). The most significant of these was a lengthy article
in the September-October 2006 issue titled “Canon Fodder,” which de￾scribed his unsuccessful attempt to write “a film version of Harold Bloom’s
The Western Canon.” The article, which is easily available on Schrader’s
website (paulschrader.org), remains wonderful reading for the way that he
puzzles through the historical, aesthetic, and moral stakes of canon build￾ing—issues that are as vexed in cinema as they are in literary studies.
Such considerations feel especially current now because the British film
magazine Sight and Sound has recently published its once-a-decade “Great￾est Films of All Time” poll of filmmakers and film critics. The poll is vener￾able, having emerged in 1952. It has also been extremely conservative. Until
now every poll since 1962 has had either Citizen Kane (1941) or Vertigo
(1958) in the top spot, and Vertigo only displaced Citizen Kane in 2012. Af￾ter a tentative attempt to expand the voting pool in 2012, Sight and Sound
cast its net wider this time, asking a total of 1639 film people of various
kinds to take part (including festival types, archive types, academics, etc., as
The Master Gardener and the Ten Greatest Films of All Time 123
well as filmmakers, whose votes constitute a separate list).
The result was a massive upset. On the critics’ list (which gets the most
attention), Vertigo and Citizen Kane were both displaced from number one
by a new champion: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Com￾merce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). There has been considerable blowback on this
from folks no less important than Schrader himself. In December, Indiewire
reported that Schrader posted on his Facebook page that “Akerman’s film is
a favorite of mine, a great film, a landmark film but its unexpected number
one rating does it no favors. Jeanne Dielman will from this time forward be
remembered not only as an important film in cinema history but also as a
landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.”
Obviously I disagree. Long-time readers of this chronicle will recall
that its second instalment in 2015, which included a tribute to Akerman
upon her untimely death, was titled “Jeanne Dielman was my Star Wars.” I
think Akerman is one of the truly major filmmakers, which is a claim I’m not
ready to make of many Hollywood types (Scorsese would be an exception, as
would Coppola up to and including Apocalypse Now). She is serious, rigor￾ous, and committed to her medium in a manner that is on a completely dif￾ferent level than Welles or Hitchcock. To put it in a literary way: if Jean-Luc
Godard is cinema’s James Joyce, then Akerman is its Virginia Woolf. To see
Jeanne Dielman at the top of the poll is to see a cinema that I recognize as
“the real thing” validated.
The business about Sight and Sound surrendering to wokeness (or what￾ever it’s being called this week) is another matter. The magazine brought
this kind of criticism onto itself when it so preeningly boasted of how much
more inclusive it was now, with its parent organization’s executive direc￾tor Jason Wood saying that “canons should be challenged and interrogated,
and as part of the BFI’s remit to not only revisit film history but to also
reframe it, it’s so satisfying to see a list that feels quite radical in its sense of
diversity and inclusion.” Ah yes, very noble. However, there are only 68 crit￾ics from Canada on that list of 1639 (4% if my math is to be trusted) and only
26 (1.5%) from Ireland—a country with which the U.K. has had a somewhat
complicated relationship, to say the least. Speaking of such countries, India,
which has long had the largest film industry in the world despite some CO￾VID-era setbacks, has 52 voters on the list; that’s 3% of the total. The U.K.
checks in at 692 voters or 42%, the U.S. at 416 or 25%. The list thus shows
that, in a drearily typical way, “radical in its sense of diversity and inclusion”
124 The Dalhousie Review
basically means “lots of different kinds of Yanks and Brits.” Forgive me if I
am not super impressed by the political righteousness of that.
I can also see why such a list may be dismissed as too grandiose, as
it gives the illusion of consensus where none could ever really exist. But
rather than the nationalist bean-counting I just indulged in, the real plea￾sure of poring over the roster of invitees is to see the lists of various in￾dividuals. Seeing that the Irish film historian Ruth Barton included both
Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011) and Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes (1948) explains a lot about what
she brings to her analyses of Irish cinema. The same goes for the broodingly
religious Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili (whom I wrote about
in my Spring 2021 chronicle) and her inclusion of Jacques Tati’s Playtime
(1967), her countryman Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying (1957),
and Jeanne Dielman. Journals like the Toronto quarterly Cinema Scope
and Paris’ venerable Cahiers du cinéma also publish annual “best film” lists
(Cahiers since 1951, which probably inspired the Sight and Sound list) be￾cause they stake out a general editorial position and inform readers as to
what their writers value in world cinema. Less than an objective assessment
of greatness, these magazines are making the subjective nature of their as￾sessments that much clearer.
It is in that spirit that I want to offer my own list here. It’s not because
I feel hurt that I wasn’t invited to participate (I’m sure Sight and Sound just
lost my email) but rather because these lists allow readers to calibrate their
understanding of where critics stand overall. In any case, here are the films,
in chronological order, that I’d be most happy to watch over and over and
that I’m the most certain doing so would always lead to something new:
Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936)
Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962)
Pierre Perrault and Michael Brault’s Pour la suite du monde (For Those
Who Will Follow, 1963)
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles (1975)
Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo (1977)
Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (Sunless, 1983)
Peter Weir’s Witness (1985)
The Master Gardener and the Ten Greatest Films of All Time 125
Gil Cardinal’s Foster Child (1987)
Jean-Luc Godard’s JLG/JLG—autoportrait de décembre (Self-Portrait
in December, 1994)
In terms of criticism, these films are where I stand. If not exactly the ten
greatest of all time, they are certainly, for me, the ten most inexhaustible.

The Master Gardener and The Ten Greatest Films of all Time

Low, Stephen

STEPHEN LOW
THE STRUGGLE TO CHANGE: KING LEAR
AND QUEEN GONERIL AT SOULPEPPER
HOW CAN A PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER TAKE PLACE? How can
the younger generation take the reins of power from the old to lead us into
a new world—a world that is better than the one we currently live in? Can
the change that inevitably occurs as the older generation grows older and
becomes unsuitable to lead allow for the inequities and inequalities that ex￾ist to be addressed and relegated to the dustbin of history? These are the
questions explored in new productions of William Shakespeare’s King Lear
and Erin Shields’ Queen Goneril performed in repertory at the Soulpepper
Theatre Company at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.
King Lear is well-known for tackling many of these themes, and this
production is no exception. The set, designed by Ken Mackenzie, is domi￾nated by two towering bulwark structures that are wheeled around to de￾marcate different interior spaces. These castle-like structures make physi￾cal the imposing power that is the impetus for the action, although their
movement often slows the pace of the play, which takes almost three and a
half hours. Black drapes cascade down the wall at the back of the stage, sug￾gesting the opulence of Lear’s court as well as the power-hungry ill will that
envelops his kingdom in darkness. Above the drapery, a panel of red omi￾nously evokes the blood that will be shed in copious amounts as the charac￾ters kill and maim each other in their quest for power. This production also
has modern elements, such as laptops, handguns, contemporary costuming,
and the appearance of the Red Cross in the final scenes, which resonates in
both the medieval world of King Lear as well as our contemporary world.
It also explores territory beyond questions of how an older generation can
go gently into that good night by casting three black actresses in the roles
of Lear’s daughters: Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. This colour-conscious
casting seems to raise the question of how women of colour can struggle
274 The Dalhousie Review
to achieve positions of power after old white men begrudgingly relinquish
them, although it takes on a new meaning when paired with Queen Gon￾eril.
Queen Goneril is set seven or eight years before King Lear, and it asks
questions regarding the transfer of power from the old to the young more
directly. The play begins with a short video featuring Tom McCamus and
Virgilia Griffith, who play Lear and Goneril in both productions. This video
gives audiences not yet familiar with King Lear the necessary information
about Shakespeare’s play to understand Shields’ prequel, and it also high￾lights the inequities between the iconic and legendary Shakespearean roles
available to men, such as Lear, Hamlet, Richard III, etc., and those available
to women, of which they only name Juliet. These inequities are subtly hint￾ed at when McCamus speaks over Griffith throughout the video to “mans￾plain” some details and even, at one point, to reduce Goneril as a character
through the dismissive description of her as a “bitch.” As Griffith notes, the
role of Lear can be played in the later stages of an actor’s career, whereas an
actress is fortunate to be cast as Juliet, the ingénue, after which her career
can take off or fade into obscurity. The video thus compares the roles of men
and women who occupy positions of power under similar circumstances—in
this case, the lead role in a play. While men are afforded the luxury of agency
as they age, women are not.
The plot of Shields’ prequel centres on Goneril’s attempts to persuade
her aged father to abdicate, allowing her to take the throne in his place.
Goneril rightly contends that she is ready for the position, as she has learned
how to rule from her father. As Shields writes in the program notes, Queen
Goneril “is an investigation of our contemporary world in which those who
have historically been relegated to the supporting roles are demanding to be
centre stage. It’s about the challenges of achieving power and leading effec￾tively in institutions that were constructed with only a small segment of the
population in mind. It’s about interrogating the authority of our most laud￾ed texts and the place they hold in our society.” In the opening monologue of
the play, Goneril reveals that her efforts to persuade her father to relinquish
power are motivated by love. She understands better than Lear that he is old
and would be happier living a life of leisure in retirement. This, of course,
is opposite to how Goneril’s motives are interpreted in many productions
of King Lear, when she, unlike her younger sister Cordelia, concedes to her
father’s petty request that each of his daughters put into words how they
The Struggle to Change 275
love him before they receive their third of the kingdom. Knowing this before
seeing King Lear would better explain the characterization of Goneril in this
production.
Regan, the middle child, is also given greater depth, which is lacking in
Shakespeare’s play. In Queen Goneril, Regan feels invisible in a household
in which her father attends to his eldest daughter’s education in govern￾ing and dotes on his youngest daughter, Cordelia, whom he loves the most.
Regan feels stifled and wants to indulge in her youthful desires, which leads
her to participate in a party celebrating Kent’s return that tragically ends
when she is raped by Gloucester, who is a well-known philanderer.
Cordelia, who is absent for most of King Lear, is also given greater
depth in Queen Goneril. Being the child whose birth ended in her mother’s
death, Cordelia feels compelled to smile, despite what she might be feeling,
with the hope of bringing happiness to a home saturated with domestic ten￾sion. These efforts have reified her siblings’ attitude that she is merely a silly
child, which frustrates Cordelia as she becomes mature. The stories of the
three sisters are thus woven together to dramatize the universal struggle to
find one’s place in a changing world.
Overall, the performances are mixed. McCamus embodies the titular
character well—with a bushy beard, overgrown eyebrows, and an aged￾man’s physicality, he looks very much the part—but his recourse to anger
overshadows the madness that plagues the character from the start of King
Lear. Despite the fact that Lear is often rash, McCamus makes his angry
outbursts seem rational, as they are simply an expression of disappointment
at the actions of his ungrateful daughters. Of course a father would be up￾set over their lack of gratitude! Instead of a gradual descent into madness,
it only emerges in full force when he finally faces the elements during the
storm in the heath. In addition, Jonathan Young’s Edmund is too old for
the part, as he is far too close in age to Oliver Dennis, who plays his father
Gloucester. While Young speaks the text clearly, he also does not come off
as the dastardly bastard that he is in both senses of that word. Lear’s daugh￾ters are competently played by Griffith, Vanessa Sears, and Helen Belay,
but they are all too nice, which is justified if you see Queen Goneril first but
seems out of place if you only see King Lear. Damien Atkins’ Edgar is well￾balanced, as he maintains the necessary innocence to anchor the audience
to at least one moral character before and after his descent into the savage,
dirty, mad Poor Tom, whom he embodies with impressive physicality and
276 The Dalhousie Review
vocal acrobatics as a disguise to escape Edmund’s machinations. Jordan
Pettle is also competent as the moral Albany—an underwhelming but nec￾essary character—but Nancy Palk is miscast as Lear’s fool. She has too much
gravitas as an actress to play such a debased character. And because she,
like McCamus, is an actor in the later stages of her career, the occasional
touch or embrace of Lear makes her seem more like a sister or wife than a
jester, who is supposed to be a source of laughter and ridicule.
While the performances are mostly misdirected and the casting is con￾fusing in King Lear, the performances in Queen Goneril are strong, and the
casting helps rather than hinders the production. Specifically, Lear’s daugh￾ters, we learn, were born from an African royal whom Lear took as his wife,
which tells the audience that the casting choice was not colourblind in terms
of how the characters are seen within the world of the play. Their black iden￾tity is also addressed directly at several points when the sisters bemoan hav￾ing to endure racist microaggressions at the court.
Trans actor Breton Lalama plays the role of Oswald with a shaved head
and men’s clothing, yet their voice hints to their trans identity, which is con￾fusing in King Lear but makes narrative sense in Queen Goneril. Lalama
begins the latter play as a cis-female character—Goneril’s maid and lesbian
lover—but after Goneril is forced to dismiss her (she is set up as the thief
of a cherished music box that reminds Goneril and Regan of their mother)
Lalama assumes the disguise of a man named Oswald in order to remain
at court. Goneril eventually discovers Oswald’s former identity, after which
Oswald confesses that this masculine appearance better reflects what he has
discovered to be his authentic identity. Goneril then demands that her for￾mer lover stay near her side as a male servant, which he does in King Lear.
Palk does not play the fool in Queen Goneril; rather, she plays a maid
whose wisdom matches the actress’ stature, and she often makes the most
of striking moments. After Lear complains that the hard, stale bread he has
been served threatens to loosen another of his gold fillings, for example,
Palk tells him that the court is forced to eat hardened stale bread because
the grain stores are low and bread must be eaten past its freshness. Later in
the play, we see Palk as a maid shifting through a bucket of shit in hopes of
finding valuable trinkets that are often accidently swallowed, and she even￾tually finds the gold filling her schemes have successfully dislodged from the
king’s mouth and declares that wading through shit to find a piece of gold
to help her and her family survive is an apt metaphor for womanhood itself.
The Struggle to Change 277
Only with her innate sense of poise can she make digging through excre￾ment look dignified.
In contrast to the disjointed and lengthy production of King Lear, Queen
Goneril is far more cohesive. Despite its excellent performances, well-knit
plotting, and beautiful writing, however, its politics often feel heavy-handed
and overdone. After all, the play examines rape, miscarriage, arranged mar￾riage, the imperative to smile, transgender identity, women in positions of
power, racism, and more within its two and a half hours. These topics are
certainly important, but considering that they are also in vogue, Queen Gon￾eril feels overwrought in retrospect.

THE STRUGGLE TO CHANGE: KING LEAR AND QUEEN GONERIL AT SOULPEPPER

Brierley, Alison

Best By

Faber, Alyda

"When I Finally Learn to Love": An Interview with Steven Heighton

Lipszyc, Carol

CAROL LIPSZYC
AGNOSTIC STANDING BEFORE TRINITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH (OLD THORNHILL)
Church bells chime on Brooke Street, their music box melody
cradled in the lap of a noonday sun. I stand
before a foreign house of prayer, its frame a robe
of old white linen, its steeple crowned by a weathervane
of brass gold.
Cool cap of air rustles the leaves
of waking trees. A neighbour clears
his front yard of winter’s neglect which
carries no admission of sin
in the underbrush. Where then the well-worn
hymn to spring? Perhaps the isolate earth waits only
for a seedling place ample and protected
and a kneeling shadow whose hands
till beauty.

Agnostic Standing Before Trinity Anglican Church

Pierluigi, Melanie

MELANIE PIERLUIGI
NIGHT WITH AN ACTOR
Wait until the mind is blank. Wait for the lines
to come like uncluttered comas we wake from.
Undress this mystery of rain, white noise, night
a calloused limp into March. You think I like it rough,
words mimed around the neck, an unfitted
puzzle in shambles on your table. Piece the past
into appealing positions. Into an apparition I’ve
orphaned, held grinless to my side because who
doesn’t like to pretend desire is a tangible,
malfunctioned crack along your wall?
A forgotten sentence. A script with the
characters missing. No line to repeat.

Night with an Actor

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